African American teachers are in high demand in urban schools. Presupposing these spaces as operating within a matrix of domination for African Americans in the United States, in this chapter, two African American scholars of differing genders model womanist thinking as politic educational ethics and praxis. hooks, Fanon, and Lorde elucidate the Black subject’s ontological condition as a problem of spectatorship. Womanist theory responds to sociopolitical forces devaluing the self as minoritized subject. Through critical self-reflexivity that acknowledges the debilitating white normative gaze and the inner turmoil of its subjugation, womanist thinking offers a normative syntax of freedom. A womanist praxis of radical subjectivity and a pedagogy of love excavates one’s inner visions for oneself and for one’s students that engenders self-authorship.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.

African American women writers of the 1980s were arguably the beneficiaries of cultural and political phenomena that held sway during the 1970s and 1980s.One of the major tenets and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s was the validation of Black voices that came from within Black communities, drew upon the culture of Black communities -- especially the use of music and the vernacular -- and posited the validity, reality, and truth of that culture.Black women writersof the 1980s provide a logical progression from those communal assertions of value and freedom to extending the possibilities for such expression.This chapter considers the contributions of writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Octavia Butler, Gloria Nayor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison as writers who extend and liberate creative and cultural possibilities initiated in earlier decades.